It started, as it usually did, with the snapping of a twig.
As it has been a long time since we ran into the Onodama cannibal tribes, I grew comfortable and relaxed in my safety. In fact, I didn’t even put down the knife, or the potato I was cleaning at the time when I heard the sound. My mind lazily walked through the possibilities: Ean was goosing around, Ugor found a mushroom, Zakh-Zvei peeled the tree bark for his paint, or maybe Rina got bored of her mathematics and went to breathe some forest air. A few more peels of potato skin fell by the extinguished fire before the worries began to settle.
Ean, Eva, and Ugor were all out hunting. I put the knife and the potato down into the pot, and scanned the campsite. Rina-Zvei and her father left for Ikamase and wouldn’t be back for another day. My hand slowly reached for the flail leaning by a tree just behind me. Another snap of a twig, this time from the opposite side of the camp.
“Hello?” I called into the woods. “Eva? Ugor? Who’s there?”
No answer. Clearly it was not Death himself that came to reap my life, as the birds still happily sang their song, and the morning sun still burned as bright as it should. Not a wolf – they would not attack me if they could get their teeth on a moose, of which there were plenty here. Not a bear, as there were none in Onodama forests, and I wouldn’t hear one coming, anyway. My flail’s chain tinkled quietly, like the smallest wind chime, as the sickle on its end waved back and forth in the wind.
There was no sense in hiding myself now that I had given away my position with my voice, so I got up and slowly circled the camp, peering into the woods. Someone who had taken the time to approach the clearing quietly before the twigs gave him away probably saw me before I even knew he was there, anyway. My mind told me not to worry, as the last time we saw any of the cannibal tribes on our trip was two days ago, and I could probably handle a lone bandit, so long as he wasn’t a Natural – then all bets would be off. Knowing this helped little, however, as I found my knuckles white around the iron staff of the flail.
I came to the spot from which I thought the second snap to have come from. The trees grew bushy canopies here, blocking out most sunlight and creating a pitch black gloom beneath them. The sun was in front, which made it so much harder to see. I moved the branches apart and thought I could make out a hunched shape somewhere in the distance, but way too far to have produced the sound...
“Daenan, was it?”
My heart kicked me in the ribcage and I half-spun, half-jumped right around. He was five steps behind me, leaning on a tree and lazily gnawing on a piece of the moose jerky that dried on a string between the tree’s branches.
“Bit dry, that,” he mildly concluded, and tossed the ruined meat to the ground. “The goat meat you served me before had such a refined taste. Eva’s quite the chef, yes?”
“Didn’t we beat you down back in Rupture, Michael?” I said through gritted teeth, gripping my flail with both hands now. “You here for more?”
He hadn’t changed a bit. His face hinted at a not particularly ancient, not particularly sick, nor a particularly starved man that still managed to look like a skeleton with wrinkled skin and dark circles under his eyes. And, as before, he was draped in black – nothing but black. That he hadn’t changed was just a bit unusual in itself, as the last time I saw him was with my flail’s sickle sticking out of his chest and pumping raging lightning through his body.
“It’s Aidan, actually,” he said, and pushed himself off the tree to pace back and forth. I saw no evidence of his ice gauntlet anywhere, or any other weapon. “There is a certain mood attached to every name – the spirit of it, if you will. I like to experiment with different aliases. Some, for instance, make me feel more confident. Others, more ready to cause suffering. ‘Michael’ fit particularly well with, ah... friendliness, I suppose?”
“Did you suddenly change it to ‘Murderer’ when you started killing people?” I growled, walking in a circle around him. That’s right, sidestep just like that, and trip on the pot. I’ll cut you right this time. “I killed you – I thought I killed you once, I can do it again. I’d like to see your Sovereign put you back together after I’m done with you.”
“Please, Daenan,” he waved me off with a sarcastic little smile. What a snake. “I didn’t come here to fight – hmm, merely to evaluate, yes. You’ll notice that I am quite unarmed.” He stopped just shy of the pot and spread out his arms at me, as if to prove he didn’t smuggle anything in. “This is to ensure the validity of the experiment.”
“What are you talking about?”
“Oh, you wouldn’t know. I started the topic of names by design, see. Tell me,” he said, and lowered his voice, once again smiling mysteriously. “What kind of connotation does the name ‘Alice’ carry for you?”
“What kind of—I don’t—”
It was so quiet. I would never have heard it if the birds hadn’t stopped singing then (or, perhaps, sometime before then), for the sound barely differed from the rustling of leaves. It was also a rustling, but of a robe, with no other sound accompanying it. Not even the sound of footsteps.
I turned just in time to deflect an attack made with a narrow white object with the handle of my flail, the force of which buckled my knees. I righted myself and took a step forward, whipping the sickle around at my attacker’s head, and it struck flesh. Despite reaching as fast as I could for the hepatizon core, a strong kick to the chest knocked me down on the ground before I could grasp it. The flail was yanked out of my hands, its blade still stuck in the side of a large tan-brown robe.
“Enough,” Aidan said. “Let him get up. You blind-sided him, stupid girl. This was supposed to be a fair fight.”
Groaning, I got off the ground. Aidan had ‘Alice’ give me time to breathe, and I used it to see exactly who my opponent was.
That unusual robe covered most of her body like a cloak. Underneath were the same black Sovereignty military clothes that Aidan wore, though they looked a bit more worn. I saw no trace of the white object, but the robe covered most of her left half – her right hand was empty. Short blonde hair peeked from under the hood. What I saw of her expression was not of rage, nor that of emptiness. If it were a metal, it would be the kind that had a cool feel to it even on the sunniest day.
Without showing any difference in emotion, she pulled the sickle out of her left shoulder and threw the flail to my feet, never breaking eye contact with me. There was no soul there, in her eyes. There was something else.
Careful not to take my eyes off her, I picked up my flail. Blood dripped from the sickle down onto the grass. I righted the flail, holding it like a staff. As the sickle swung close to the hepatizon core inside the handle, the blood on it went up in wispy smoke, and the chained blade was violently flicked backwards. A fairly strong force Natural, then. Great. That's for thinking that peeling potatoes wasn't that exciting.
All was still. We stared at each other – or rather, I stared. She looked. Peered, maybe, or inspected. Observed? Anything but stared. All was still for another few seconds, until a careless wind intruded the meadow. The breeze blew the robe back like a cape, and where there was supposed to be a black military sleeve, there was a sawed-off wraith arm.
“What the--?!” I screamed, taking several instinctive steps back. The alien left arm twitched, raised, and raked its white claws through the robe, tearing it off. “You—you sick freaks! What have you—how—why...?”
She didn’t let me finish, and charged me with an inhuman speed. Her face never changed, just looking forward, methodically, in shallow concentration. I dove out of her way and the claw whistled through empty air, but her eyes were already looking at me, at my new position. Before I could gather myself, she spun about her axis once before sweeping the wraith arm through the air above her in an arc and bringing it down straight at my head.
The tempered Mogh steel of the flail held, but my muscles were near giving way, and my bones made sounds that bones should not make. The claw twitched inches above eyes and I saw every little red line of capillaries and blood vessels gripping the bare bleached bones like vines, as if they were on a real wraith. The rest of her was down on one knee in a fairly light and relaxed stance, holding me with the claw like a child would hold a grasshopper with a cupped hand. But the worst thing was not the wraith arm; it was the unchanging face and its unflinching eyes, looking at me as an alchemist might look at his vial when combining two potions.
I gritted my teeth and pushed hard on the flail, trying to force her off, but nothing came of that. Instead, she brought her right hand to my face – the fingers of which I now saw to be ringed with black metal, the rings connected to each other with a string – and extended her thumb. Little pink dots of hepatizon showed in the rings, and an orb of pure force, like shimmering air on a hot afternoon, swirled just off her palm.
Life fought back hard against the jaws of death. Desperation filled me, and I half-roared, half-screamed as my body found strength that was never there before. Even the flail groaned now, but the claw budged. It budged! The success injected more power into my muscles, and, little by little, distance was made between the claw and my head. She smiled then.
It was a passing little smile, like the twitch in your lips you get when you hear a genuinely funny joke told at a funeral. The wraith arm crushed me with the might of a solid steel leviathan, as if she wasn’t even using a fraction of her strength before this moment. My scream died into a choke as the flail now pressed down on my throat, and my hands lay pinned by the metal handle. So as to not accidentally quicken my death, the grip once again lightened now that the flail wasn’t a problem. She extended all of her fingers now on her right hand, and the swirl rapidly intensified.
“Wait,” I gasped. “Before – you—kill me, I have something I want to... tell you. You are... so beautiful.”
Her hand snapped shut around the orb in a surprise movement, which vanished from existence with a loud cracking noise. Her methodical expression remained unchanged, but the pressure of the claw lightened considerably, if for a moment. But a moment was all that I needed to launch a rock-shattering kick into her stomach into which I put every portion of my remaining strength. It sent her flying off me. My thought was right, then – neither the strength or the weight of the wraith arm was not hers, it was applied through her force Nature. Now that I had the advantage, I made no plans of giving it up, and scooped up the flail just before leaping at her.
“Ooh, big mistake,” Aidan chuckled behind me. He was right. If he really wouldn’t interfere, the battle would be over for Alice. I stepped down on her stomach, gripped the flail right at the hepatizon core – a fiery burn through my hand made me clench my teeth every time I did this – and jammed its butt end into her chest.
Her back arched from the lightning surge flowing though her body, but I kept her pinned to the ground with my foot. The electricity locked her muscles in a spasm, finally replacing that look of cold metal with a pained scowl. I admired her strength as even through the waves of electricity she managed to turn her head just enough to look at me. Then I saw – or maybe it was a spasm – the corner of her mouth briefly twitch into another smile. Then I understood that Aidan was not talking about her mistake.
Everything happened so fast that I could only recall it in frames. One moment I leaned on the staff to wipe that smirk off her face. The next, I felt bent in half, sideways at the waist. Then I was flying through the air. At some point after being thrown, I realized that there were now four spots of incinerating pain in my side. At the next, I smashed into a tree, and briefly lost consciousness, only to awake five seconds later to pain in every square inch in my body.
When I could see again, I saw through a haze Alice’s figure approaching me. I couldn’t move, every limb, every rib threatened to burn its way out through my body. Unable to bear the pain, I closed my eyes and opened them again. Now I saw a midriff clothed in black and the arm of a wraith before me, its talons dripping with blood. I felt like a rubbish heap, broken in every single place. It hurt as I breathed, and I slowly blinked. Now the ringed right hand was gathering an orb of a hot mid-afternoon air in front of me. Was this a sick little game, I thought to myself. Did she make a bet that she would deal the killing blow by shredding apart my head with a force blast? Why couldn’t she finish it with just one clean swoop of the sharp white talons?
But opening my eyes for the last time, I saw a better picture. I heard, somewhere in the distance, Aidan’s panicked shouts, and I saw no more midriff or claw or air. Equally distant, I heard Ugor’s voice, and the sound of arrows ripping through the air. Only the kind of sound arrows make when shot from an oaken bow hardened with recipes known to no one but Ean. The pain and the trauma got the better of me then, and I succumbed into unconsciousness.
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My inability to write battle scenes is legendary, so I decided to practice by writing this scene, and have some fun with it while I was at it. Keeping that in mind, I would love it if you guys tore this to ribbons, as I'm trying hard to improve. Does it flow well? Does any wording feel awkward or out of place? Is any part of the action unclear?
Thanks in advance.
So then, he didn't fully retain his balance, or he wouldn't have fallen... Anyway, we already know that Aidan is making Alice give him time to breathe from his dialogue in the prior sentence. So you can pretty much just say that Alice stops, he groans and gets off the ground, taking in the appearance of his opponent. In whatever words you want, of course.
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